New York wants to make posting a job you'll never fill illegal
Senate Bill S8877 would target "ghost jobs" — listings companies float with no intent to hire. The thread's first reaction wasn't celebration. It was: how would anyone ever enforce this?
The bill aims at postings kept up to harvest resumes, pad pipelines, or signal growth that isn't happening. Supporters call it overdue relief for applicants who lose weeks waiting on roles that were never real.
The asterisk came from a New Yorker: the state already has a salary-disclosure law it doesn't enforce. A law that "sits on the books being violated openly" fixes nothing.
A law against jobs that were never going to be filled
The pitch is simple and overdue-sounding: New York's Senate Bill S8877 would make "ghost jobs" illegal — listings companies post with no real intent to hire, kept live to collect resumes, build a pipeline, or project growth. Fast Company's writeup frames it as the labor market finally getting a rule against a practice that wastes job-seekers' time at the worst possible moment in their lives.
The mechanic problem nobody can answer
The FIFA-mob jokes aside, the thread kept circling one hole: a ghost job is invisible from the applicant's side. You can't tell a stalled real search from a fake one.
How do you enforce that? I don't even know what I applied to that's a ghost and what isn't … recruiters ghost, sometimes companies ghost and sometimes they reply … How did people even find out ghost jobs existed? — a job-seeker who can't distinguish a ghost from a slow reply
A second loophole surfaced fast. Companies legally obligated to post a role they've already filled, the well-known H-1B pattern, will just keep posting and quietly never select anyone.
"It will just sit on the books"
The coldest take came from someone who's watched New York pass exactly this kind of law before.
New York doesn't even enforce its salary requirement declaration law. It will most definitely not enforce this law either. It will just sit on the books being violated openly. — a New Yorker citing the unenforced salary-disclosure statute
Not everyone was cynical. A self-described libertarian made the case that fraudulent public listings impose compounding costs on thousands of people, which is precisely the kind of public harm a law should let them sue over.
if there would be laws for … fraudulent or intentionally very misleading statements … This is public harm. The laws are protections for regular people, in this case people who are looking for jobs. — a libertarian founder building a social platform
The enforcement gap is the whole story
Strip the headline and what's left is a familiar pattern: a popular rule with no obvious detection mechanism. The bill assumes you can prove intent-not-to-hire, but the only people who know a posting is fake are the ones who posted it. Commenters proposed the realistic fix themselves — push the burden onto job boards, require employers to produce evidence the role was filled, or build a private transparency registry both sides opt into. Without one of those, S8877 risks becoming the second New York labor law that everyone violates because nobody is checking.
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